This is too confusing. It should never be this confusing. Kill a person before their life ever has to be this twisted up.
And I fell asleep for the whole day at home because I didn’t want to fall asleep at the inn, because when I fell asleep at the inn these days weird things showed up in my diary and I didn’t want that to happen anymore.
Herman was asleep in his chair when I left later, and I imagined wrapping his housecoat belt around his neck and squeezing tight so all the veins in his neck filled up and his face went purple and spit flew from his mouth when he said please no please please Noelle no, and his eyes bulged till they turned red and popped and splattered in my smiling face. I would do that to Herman. But I wouldn’t do it to Sammy, not Sammy who’d never done anything bad to me except weave around my feet, slowing me down when I tried to RUN up or down the basement steps.
When I got to work, Alf was already there. “Where were you this morning?” he asked.
Usually we saw each other before we left for home, walked a very short part of the way together before splitting at a corner that separated his nicer part of town from my shittier part.
“I couldn’t sleep, so I just left when I heard Jessica.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. Just didn’t know what happened to you.”
“I’ll make it up to you. I can take the buzzer tonight.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“No, it’s okay. I want to.”
“You want the buzzer?”
“Yeah, why not.”
“Listen, Noelle, are—”
And he was definitely going to ask me if I was okay, he was going to tell me I looked awful, he was going to be CONCERNED, and that was going to make me very angry and maybe say something I’d regret, so I cut him off.
“Do you want to play cards?”
“Well, I was going to—”
“Please let’s play cards. I’ll actually die if we don’t play cards right this second.”
And he gave me a weird look but he grabbed the cards anyway, and I made a giant pot of coffee. And when Alf got tired and wanted to go to bed, I grabbed the buzzer and took it to my room. And I lay on the bed and I stared at it, hard, thinking about Dr. Schiller peeling back a sheet of my matted hair, seeing my scalp, gagging, calling in a colleague, saying you’ve gotta take a look at this, then both of them peering into my head, seeing patterned space, sticking their fingers in there the way she had, their fingers warmer, not right, not cold like hers. Patterned space that I wanted so badly but definitely couldn’t drift into right now, not now, or maybe I could. Maybe I should drift into patterned space and kill Sammy like I should have last night. Who cares what they do to me because I don’t want to be alive anyway.
And all night the house was the conspicuous quiet it is when we have guests. Except we didn’t have any guests. It was being conspicuously quiet because it knew I was awake. On guard and watching it. And it would never show itself this way. Because it could be kind of a dick like that.
40. Jessica West, the woman who first discovered the bodies and called the police.
41. Nathanial Holcomb’s son, according to Wink’s journals.
42. Confirmed. Though many searched extensively, no one was able to find anything else out about Wink except for what he’d left in his journals. Wink wrote that people would try to track him but that no one would ever break the old devil’s spell that hid him. And to this day, that prediction remains true. His last name, his age, place of birth, etc. all remain unknown. Investigators couldn’t even determine the prison at which he claimed to have shared a cell with Nathanial Holcomb’s son. On the very slim chance that Hansel Holcomb was indeed serving time at more than 100 years of age, attempts were made by investigators to locate him. However, they discovered that shortly after the release of his father’s essay on sensory deprivation and punishment, Hansel Holcomb changed his name and mostly disappeared, decades before he’d supposedly roomed with Wink in prison.
43. In our interview, Jessica expressed deep regret that she didn’t take Noelle to the doctor herself. She told us, “I never should have left it up to goddamn Herman to deal with.”
44. Sirenomelia, or Mermaid Syndrome, is an extremely rare congenital deformity in which the legs of an infant are fused together.
Seventeenth Entry
So all night, nothing happened, and even though I should have been happy that nothing happened, it made me feel even more nervous. When I got home I was exhausted and slept all day. Then I ate a bowl of cereal with Herman in front of the TV for dinner before I left for my doctor appointment. He told me he was feeling better than he had in years.
“Yeah, my energy’s up. I think I might even go on a walk tonight.”
“A walk.”
“Yeah, I might go down to Ollie’s and pick up a chicken.”
“You’re going to walk to Ollie’s yourself? Jesus, I feel like we need to celebrate or something.”
“Oh stop.”
“No really, I’m going to call ahead and have them get balloons and make it so, like, confetti shoots from the register when you check out.”
“Look, if you’d rather I didn’t walk there myself, then you can just grab another chicken for me after work.”
“No, no. I’ll believe it when I see it, that’s all.”
“Listen, Noelle, for your information, I think it’s that last chicken you bought me, as a matter of fact. I think it’s turned me around. I’ve been feeling better and better since I ate it.”
“Quick, someone alert the press, local greasy chicken establishment cures blood diseases, irritable bowels, and chronic uselessness.”
“Well, someone’s bitchy today. I should call and warn Alf.”
“He’s used to it.”
“Well, joke if you want to, but I really have been feeling great since that last chicken, and I won’t let you ruin it for me.”
Ruin it for you. HA! I brought you the goddamn chicken. The cure-all chicken. You fucking idiot. I brought you the cure-all chicken, I saved you, you ungrateful fuck.
He just wants me to remember how I moaned about it. He wants me to think, “And can you believe it, Noelle? That you almost didn’t get him that chicken? Can you believe that you almost KEPT your father from feeling good and healthy? What’s the matter with you?”
You rotten little stinking ingrate. You fucked-up little person who can’t even love her mother and her father when they’re both wrapped into one feeble blood-diseased body. You wished you could strangle him with his housecoat belt, you wrote it here yourself, his blasted open eyeball blood all over your face you little fucking asshole.
No, that’s not true. I don’t want that. I want him to be better. I do. My life will be better if he’s better. But god dammit, you’re right, I also want him to suffer, not to die, but to suffer. I want him to be suffering when I leave him forever.
No I don’t. Diary, I don’t. Forget I said that. It’s hard now that you’re alive. I can’t just scribble things out and expect you not to remember.
I’m probably going to have to kill you at some point. Throw you into a fire so no one ever sees any of this.
Eighteenth Entry
All the usual stuff at the doctor’s office. Height weight ears blood. Blah blah blah. Every time I’m at the doctor’s office I expect to hear that I’ve contracted my father’s blood disease or his irritable bowels. A picture swirls into my head, the both of us totally weak, incapable of taking care of ourselves, dying alone in the house, bodies rotting in our respective TV chairs. It would be so long before anyone noticed, the stench of our irritable bowels excreting as slowly, heavily, as the life leaving our bodies.
Instead, this time all I got was a short lecture from Dr. Schiller about how important annual check-up
s are and how I’m going to start going around my dad and scheduling them myself.
“He’s got a lot on his plate, dear,” said Dr. Schiller. “How about you just start scheduling them with Rita yourself?”
“Okay.”
He checked my reflexes, which were fine. He asked me to keep an eye on an irregularly shaped freckle on my shoulder. I thought of a movie I saw once about a devil in a human body, a strange mark on his shoulder the only hint of his true form. Maybe I’m a devil. Maybe that’s why I’m able to see the inn’s ghostly stains. Only a devil would hurt sweet Sammy the way I had or hate sick Herman the way I do.
“Anything you wanna talk about?” he asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re not experiencing any pain or anything anywhere?”
“Nope.”
“Everything’s okay at home?”
“The usual.”
Diary, shut up, shut up. Would you shut the fuck up? I wasn’t about to tell him about my head so just stop it. If you don’t stop it I won’t tell you anything ever again.
“You’re looking a little pale,” he continued. “I’m going to give you a form for blood work and have them check your iron. You promise you’ll go?”
“I promise.”
“Okay. Noelle, do you mind if we talk about your father for a minute?”
This was weird. We’ve been seeing Dr. Schiller for years and years and never once has he ever brought Herman up with me. Not like this, anyway.
“Okay.”
“Now, normally I wouldn’t do this. But Noelle, I know you’re a mature young lady, and frankly I just don’t know who else to talk to about this. I’ve tried to discuss it with Herman, but you know how he is.”
I do know how he is, so I nodded.
“Noelle, I’m starting to think that your father’s health issues are, well, that they’re psychosomatic.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, it means that there might not be anything actually physically wrong with him. That all of his health problems are in his head.”
“What?” I whispered. And I could feel my face turning bright red. Nothing wrong with him. NOTHING WRONG WITH HIM. NOTHING WRONG WITH HIM.
I think Dr. Schiller noticed that my face was looking angry instead of concerned.
“That doesn’t mean he’s not experiencing these health issues in a very real way, Noelle,” he said sort of sternly. “It’s just that there really doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with his blood, or his colon, or anything else he complains about.”
“Okay, so what do we do then?”
“I want to recommend a psychiatrist.”
“So recommend one. God knows he’ll be in here again soon.”
“Well, like I said, you know how your father is. The mere mention that his symptoms might be psychological made him so defensive.”
“You told him this already?”
“Yes, the last time I saw him.”
“Last week?”
“Last week? Noelle, I haven’t seen him in over a year.” 45
“What?”
“I haven’t seen him since, oh, summer of last year I think.”
“But he said, he told me he’s been coming in all the time like usual.”
“Well, um, I don’t know what to say, Noelle. He hasn’t been. I haven’t seen your father basically since I suggested to him that his condition might be mental as opposed to physical.”
Liar fucking liar pig face liar.
“I’ll talk to him,” I said. And slid off the crunchy papered bed.
“Now honey, please tell me if this is awkward for you. I don’t want to put you in this situation, but you understand I don’t know who else to talk to about this. And I know you want him well just as much as I do.”
“I said I’ll talk to him.” Oh, I’ll talk to him alright. I want to fucking talk to him. I want to fucking kill him for making me take care of him for all these years when nothing is the goddamn matter with him. FOR LYING TO ME about even SEEING Dr. FUCKING Schiller. LYING. All the time, lying.
“Thanks, Noelle. Okay, talk to Rita. I want to look at that freckle again in six months. And you promised you’d get that blood work done.”
“I know, I will.”
And I took a sucker before I left. And I opened it up and bit it and crunched down angry on the hard sugar.
It felt good.
A sharp section of it cut my cheek a little and that kind of felt good too.
And of course I dug my finger into my scalp. And that felt really, really, really good.
And now I’m on the bus on the way to work, writing, writing away, and I want to squeeze Herman’s throat shut with my bare fucking hands. Fuck the housecoat belt, I want to feel his skin between my fingers, his pulse pounding, pounding, then gone, just like that, and all because of me.
Psychosomatic. Psycho-goddamn-somatic. Meaning he’s just a goddamn lying fuckface.
Meaning there’s nothing wrong with his colon or the goddamn muscles in his sphincter.
Sick bastard, ruining my life for no good reason.
I’m not the one who should have been aborted. He is.
I’ll show him. I’ll show that lying son of a bitch monster.
45. According to Dr. Schiller’s books, Herman hadn’t been in to see him in fourteen months. We cross-referenced this with the Dixons’ kitchen calendar, which showed what must have been false appointments scheduled twice a month.
Nineteenth Entry
Needless to say, I’m feeling very distracted at work. Alf is drawing a picture of the lobby in pencil; he’s decided to try his very best to see if he doesn’t have some latent artistic skills.
I’m glad he’s preoccupied. I don’t wanna talk to anyone but you, diary. I don’t know what to think so I’m just going to write.
The phone is ringing. I know it’s going to be Herman. I know it. The ring is so much more annoying when it’s Herman. And shit. I’m closest. If I ask Alf to get it he’ll wanna know why I can’t answer it myself. He’ll definitely ask me what’s wrong. Fuck it.
It was Herman.
“Hi, honey.”
“Hi, Herman.”
“How was Dr. Schiller?”
“He was fine.”
“Oh, sweetie … ”
“What is it?”
“Trying to walk to Ollie’s was a mistake.”
“What happened?”
“Well, I started walking and I was feeling great. I really was. Maybe not 100 percent, but better than I’ve felt in years. And you know what? I think that, I think that I was just so happy to be feeling even a little bit better at all that I really overestimated my abilities. I should have just stuck to what I was doing: resting, drinking lots of water, our treatments, you know. Anyway I was walking to Ollie’s and suddenly I felt very faint. There were big spots in my vision that were all blurry and my heart was beating so fast. Oh, Noelle, it was terrifying.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Anyway I thought I was going to faint. I really did. So I sat down on the curb and this very nice woman came up to me and asked me if I was alright. She said she’d seen me from her window and was worried about me. I must have looked really bad. She asked me if I needed her to call an ambulance. I said, oh, you know, you’re so sweet. Do you think you could call me a cab? So she did. I hope you don’t mind, Noelle, I used some of the cash in your room to pay him. I didn’t have any on me.”
“Right.”
“You don’t sound very concerned.”
“Well, obviously you’re not dead. What do you want me to do?”
“A little concern would make me feel good, I don’t mind saying.”
“No, you don’t mind saying. That’s part of your problem.”
And then
he took one of his long pauses. These long pauses in which I was supposed to think he was holding back tears, so I was supposed to just start apologizing. But I didn’t. I didn’t say anything.
The length of this pause was infuriating.
“Well, Noelle, what I’m trying to say is, I’m not better. In fact, I’m feeling worse than ever. I need you to come home, honey, and help me.”
“I can’t. I’m working.”
“Noelle, please. I almost fainted today. I need you.”
“Herman, I’m not coming home. If you start to die, call an ambulance.”
And I slammed the phone down. Alf was staring at me.
“What?” I said.
“Was that your dad?”
“No, it was a telemarketer.”
Alf laughed and returned to his pencil drawing. And I wrote all of this down in you.
Diary, what am I going to do? What am I going to do? What am I going to do? What can I do? Hearing his voice makes me wanna ram pencils into his eyes. I won’t be able to look at him. I hate that lying creep so much it’s eating up my brain worse than ever.
Twentieth Entry
Black screen when we hear the crash. Then Noelle hits the lights and her weird-sexy/terrified face fills the shot.
At 3:00 a.m. tonight a sudden crashing noise upstairs, the suite, Margaret and Wink’s apartment.
Alf and I both threw open our doors at the same time and then startled each other and screamed and then laughed our heads off and then looked up at the ceiling, the suite just above us. Where the crashing sound came from. I thought I might have heard footsteps but Alf said he didn’t. And even though the crash scared me half to death, I was relieved the house had made a sound, relieved that it wasn’t just being watchful and quiet like last night.
We decided to head downstairs, to the kitchen for a midnight snack and to maybe play some cards or walk through the hallways with a knife or an umbrella or some other makeshift weapon, half-heartedly looking for ghosts but not really looking for ghosts, because of the RULE.46
The Boy Meets Girl Massacre (Annotated) Page 11